This article is part of the weekly Technology newsletter, which is sent every Friday. If you want to sign up to receive it in its entirety, with similar topics, but more varied and brief, You can do it at this link.
A few days ago, the magazine Wired decided to remove an article from their page. “After careful review,” the editors wrote, “and from relevant material that they have provided us after its publication” they chose to eliminate it. The op-ed was titled “How Google Disrupts Search to Get Into Your Wallet.”
Their basic, and terrible, argument was that if you search for “children’s clothing,” Google modifies it to add keywords (for example, a children’s clothing brand) that return higher-paying ads that the user wasn’t actually searching for. The only beneficiary of this ruse was Google: neither the advertiser wanted to pay for those ads nor the user wanted to search for that brand.
Google flatly denied that it did so. Wired He believed them and removed the piece. Its author said she saw it on a slide during a presentation in the big monopoly case against Google, whose proceedings are largely secret, and which began in September. Despite Google’s response, the article’s author, Megan Gray, maintains her argument: “Google’s search team and the ads team worked together to secretly increase commercial requests, which gave them more revenue,” she explained to TheAtlantic.
In another monopoly case against Amazon, as revealed by Wall Street Journal, It was learned that the company had a project called Nessie: it consisted of an algorithm that observed the competition’s prices and detected if they were linked to those of Amazon. If so, Amazon could raise its prices and all the other major platforms would follow. The only ones harmed? The consumers.
Amazon claims that the US government does not fully understand how Nessie worked, which is no longer in operation. But it is one of those logical ideas within a company that has enormous control over online sales: if other companies monitor my prices and adapt them to mine, I go up and everyone goes up with me, I will end up earning more. Nessie gave Amazon more than $1 billion, according to the Journal.
The skeptical or cynical consumer will see these practices as obvious. Every company will tend to maximize its profits to the limit of legality. Or overcome it if you think they won’t get caught anyway.
The Internet was born as an alternative to the physical world: freer, less predictable, bigger. The success of a handful of companies means that their promise has become another capitalist paradise: why, if we already have 1,000 million customers, don’t we also try to get customer 1,000,000,001?
This obvious is told here by a former Google employee in a viral post titled “The tyranny of the marginal user.” The goals of a software company are intended to satisfy growth at the expense of original users. This former employee, Ivan Vendrov, remembers OkCupid in 2014, where hooking up involved answering dozens of questions in hundreds of words. The matches They were tighter. Now OkCupid is Tinder: swipe left or right, and quickly please.
“It is not only the apps of dating,” writes Vendrov. “Almost all consumer software has tended toward minimal user control, scroll infinite and junk content. Even the crown jewel of the internet, Google search, has declined to the point of being useless for complicated queries,” he adds.
But why does it happen? This is the key paragraph:
“Companies that create apps have strong incentives to get more users, even users who get little value from the app. Sometimes this is because you can monetize those low-value users with ads. Often, it’s because your business depends on the network effect [cada nuevo usuario de una plataforma aumenta el valor de esa red para otros usuarios] and even low-value users can help strengthen a company’s position. Thus, the star metric for designers and engineers is usually something like “daily active users”: the number of users who log in to your application in a 24-hour period.
That is, you have to gather users to sell them more ads at whatever price. Facebook, Instagram, X, Google, Amazon end up by natural order dying on that wall. It is not a new trend. We have already talked about Cory Doctorow’s Internet “message” at the beginning of March. We have been with this trend for some time, but it has specific milestones such as the monopoly trials in the US this month.
Now war again
What do Israel and Palestine have to do with this decline in user experience? The race for users affects all fronts. Elon Musk decided to remove link headlines on X because they took users outside the platform, even though they are useful to better understand a tweet. Content moderation costs money and it is better for users to do it for free with community notes and also defend freedom of expression.
X continues to be the place with the most global debate. But the algorithm makes that experience more complex: one day it is the alleged babies beheaded by Hamas, another day the alleged attack from Lebanon. The algorithm puts the focus on it, like when the singer comes out at a concert and jumps onto the screens of all users. The goal is to accumulate views to earn some influence or money. Why not use images from other wars? Why not exaggerate at the risk of being cruel? Why not say something just to see if it goes viral? Why not invent? The media have historically been the first to take advantage of attracting attention. But now there are thousands of accounts that issue.
The big difference, therefore, is the amount of content circulating. There are two unstoppable trends: one, if the effort to find out what is happening is so great, the incentive to dedicate two hours every day to unraveling the truth is exhausting. That would drive more people to traditional media. But two, there are millions of people, especially young people, who go to TikTok to get information because there are users/influencers telling their point of view transparently.
He Washington Post published an article about the reason for the billions of visits to informative videos about the Middle East. A young Palestinian American woman, who is clear about her preferences, said: “People really want things that are nice and easy to understand and break down, but that are also designed for social media, which is where people get their news today. in day”. An American academic added: “These tiktokers “They are skeptical of media agendas and have less interest in participating in it.”
The big difference with the media is that they are open with who they support. You know where everyone comes from. This all sounds nice until you read that Joe Biden’s digital campaign It will also occupy that space: “[De cara a la campaña de 2024] We will have an intense focus on producing viral content, reflecting the changing battlefield of modern campaigns: from promoting talking points and influencing journalists to editing popular videos and disseminating them to allied influencers. It also means combating rapidly spreading misinformation.” In that field where everyone weighs the same, influencers “paid” also influence. The pollution is enormous.
This shift towards greater transparency in opinions is a shift that also occurs in the media. This week I interviewed Ben Smith, who left the New York Times to found a global medium that was precisely “more transparent.” The newsletters that multiply are proof of that change in tone and style.
Nobody knows where it will take us. But it sure doesn’t take us to the past. We’re not the same people fighting on Twitter now. We are 20 years older and the world has changed. The people who come now have different objectives and recreating the universe of the 2010s with Bluesky or Threads is unfeasible.
If this all sounds chaotic, that’s because it is. Getting informed was never easy. Earn money either. It is logical that companies that have earned so much want a fresh new dollar, until their last breath. I’m not a fan of proverbs, but it’s clear that they summarize centuries of human experience and greed breaks the bank.
You can follow EL PAÍS Technology in Facebook and x or sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.
#deterioration #internet #unstoppable #Israel #Palestine